Monthly Archives: June 2023

Paragoge

Posted on June 30, 2023 | Leave a comment

Paragoge (par-a-go’-ge): The addition of a letter or syllable to the end of a word. A kind of metaplasm.

“Hi Ho Johnny-o“ said the jester to the king. “How many fruit flys will you kill before you go to sleep?” Things weren’t going well. I was trying to write a children’s story, but violence, bloodshed and death kept creeping in. I don’t know if fruit flies have blood, but they produce some kind of juice when you squish their irritating little bodies. Anyway, squishing kills fruit flies.

The story I’m working on is about a court jester who gets “The King is a Joke” tattooed on his butt after a night of drinking. One of his best tricks was “show Butt” where he sang a song about sitting in church that ended with him pulling down his pants. It was the king’s favorite. The king demanded the “pants down” song every day. Since he got the stupid tattoo the jester was in big trouble—he couldn’t show his butt and it’s message to the king—he would be executed, probably flayed by the king’s son Prince Plato, whose name far outstripped his capabilities. After three days of giving excuses, he had run out. His most recent excuse came close to failing: “Princess Hooters pushed me down the wine cellar stairs.” Princess Hooters believed anything He told her, so he told her she pushed him down the stairs. She asked him if he had gotten hurt. It worked (for now).

THE REST OF THE STORY:

The Jester’s Tattooed Butt

I had to go see Mollgrad the Excuse Broker. I scraped together my meager resources and headed to Mollgrad’s hovel. As a Jester, I didn’t have much to offer. I had three spare bells, a worn-out Punch and Judy set, and juggling balls painted to look like testicles. The Broker took my offerings without question. He left the room and same right back. He had a tin of pine tar and a piece of pigskin. He told me: “Stick the pigskin over your tattoo with the pine tar. Next time you perform, tell the king you backed into a hot stove and burned your butt, and the pigskin poultice is helping you heal.”

The ruse worked for two weeks, then the king wanted to know when I would heal. I panicked and told him in a couple of days. I went back to the Broker. He was surprised that the king cared. “You must see Gregory the Cutler. He is a friend and will not charge you for his services.” Gregory was a stout man—he was strong from grinding metals on his wheel. He told me to pull down my pants and press my butt’s tattoo agains the grinding wheel—to press as hard as I could. Gregory pushed on the wheel’s pedals making the wheel spin faster and faster while I p pressed tattoo against it.

It started to sting, and then it started to hurt. Gregory took a mouthful of rum and spit it on my butt. I started to moan. I started to cry. He went faster. I screamed with pain. He went faster. Then, suddenly he stopped. “It’s done,” he said. My jester pants were soaked with blood, and the the tattoo was erased! The cutler gave me some salve made from ground rabbit ears, hog fat drippings, and dandelions. I was to smear it on my butt twice a day, until my wound started to itch. Then, I was supposed to soak a rag in rum and press it on my wound to stop the itching.

I was saved—saved by lies and modern medicine.

COMMENTARY

As I read it again, I see it will not work as a children’s story. I should’ve realized that a story about a butt was unsuitable. However, as an adult-oriented story liberally seasoned with grown-up themes, I may get it published in “Cosmopolitan,” “Vanity Fair,” or maybe “Golf Digest” which has a really liberal idea of the relevance of golf to adult-themed short fiction.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Paralipsis

Posted on June 29, 2023 | Leave a comment

Paralipsis (par-a-lip’-sis): Stating and drawing attention to something in the very act of pretending to pass it over (see also cataphasis). A kind of irony.

I saw something that was very disturbing. It was a Wooly Bully, so disturbing I can’’t talk about it. It had horns and a great big jaw. It looked like a Buffalo with some kind of genetically induced malady. There were two women I know who were there observing it—Hattie and Maddy—two girls I went to Lucky Strike High School with. They ran the school paper “Help!” It was almost totally gossip about teachers and teachers and students. Every once in awhile, they’d run an opinion piece. The last one I read was about gym uniforms. It was salacious, written luridly and explicitly about the uniforms’ crotches discomfort, and how the tops of the girls’ gym suits “chafed and flattened their soft cargo.” Then, there was the revelation that the mens coach’s brother supplied the ill-fitting gym suits at inflated prices. The op-ed created a sensation. The men’s and women’s coaches were publicly shamed—made to stand in front of assembly wearing the uniforms the students were made to wear. The men’s coach kept pulling on his gym pant’s crotch, unintentionally showing how uncomfortable they are. The students loved it, chanting “crotch, crotch, crotch.” Hattie and Maddy became celebrities, to the point of being interviewed by Erin Burnett, who was visibly envious of the girls’ op-ed/expose, asking them inane questions like their favorite colors, favorite food, pet peeves.

Clearly, Hattie and Maddy were born journalists. Hattie went to the Newhouse School of Communication at Syracuse University. Maddy went to Columbia University. Maddy’s senior project is a documentary titled “Is there Hope for Rope”? It tracks the decline of rope in Western culture, and its impact on binding, hanging and towing. She looks at the “invasion” of bungee chords, Velcro, duct tape, zip ties, and to a lesser extent, super glue. In the face of the onslaught, rope has fallen. It’s vestiges are still observable in shoelaces, kite string, macrame, lobster traps, etc.

Maddy’s senior project is a biography of Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press. It follows his successes and failures. He had 7 wives and 18 children. He was the greatest bigamist of his time, keeping his wives in the milking barn where each was assigned a cow. He got his idea for the printing press in the barn, when he stepped in a cow flop. In his next step his boot “printed” a duplicate image of its sole in fresh cow manure. Gutenberg stepped in the cow flop three or four times, printing more images of his boot sole. His first printing press was two boards like a sandwich. One board was the base, the other had text carved in it and would be smeared with ink. The text board would be set atop a sheet of paper set on the base board. Next, Gutenberg’s morbidly obese brother Hans would sit on the inked text board. The pressure from his 300 pound body would make a print. It took Gutenberg a few year to perfect the press. And once he did, business took off. He first printed a series of “bawdy” stories about Lil, a shady lady. The stories had titles like “Lil Befriends the King,” “Lil Goes to Jail,” “Lil Meets the Devil.” Finally, Gutenberg was persuaded to print Bibles, which he thought was a bad idea, but the profits would be huge, so he did it.

Both of these senior projects are admirable. Hattie and Maddy deserve to be the joint anchors that they are on MSNBC. My understanding is they’re going to do an expose of the Wooly Bully’s employment by the Republican Party to scare people away from the polls on Election Day. He is ugly and menacing looking, but I’ve heard he’s really nice with interests in gardening, origami, and knitting.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Paramythia

Posted on June 28, 2023 | Leave a comment

Paramythia (pa-ra-mee’-thi-a): An expression of consolation and encouragement.

“Don’t worry baby, everything will be all right.” It was The Beach Boys. It was 1965 or ‘66. They had cars and surfboards and their own rooms where they could sit alone and think about their lives. The only car I ever had was stolen from Acme Supermarket parking lot and driven to Vinnie’s Chop Shop which was called “Vinnie’s Royal Repair.” His top “mechanic” could turn a car into parts in 45 minutes. It was amazing to watch—it was like the car fell to pieces in some kind of reverse assembly.

While I technically did not “have” a surfboard, I had lots of surfboards. I would go down to the shore and go to places where the surfers parked their woodies or parents’ cars—like Denny’s. Me and my sidekick Yammer would cut the surfboards loose from the carrier racks and shove them in the back of my parent’s station wagon, cover them with a blanket, and take off. When we got enough of them stacked up in my parent’s garage we would rent a Ryder truck and drive to Sunset Beach, California, where we sold them to an old surfer man named Chip who had lost his nose to skin cancer. When he talked he sounded like a porpoise. It was hard to understand him with all the squeaking. But he had mountains of cash—that’s all that really mattered. For the return trip we would load up on serapes. They were catching on back East. Hippies would wear them when they took LSD and claimed they conjured a rainbow portal that opened into another dimension of “being.” I saw it happen once at a Grateful Dead concert called “Butter Bullets” at Asbury Park. The people wearing serapes were flying around over the stage and “bombed” the Dead with “love, peace, and happiness.”

It was wild. The Dead played non-stop for a week. Jerry Garcia grew to at least 30 feet tall and sang “Box of Cars” while he tossed VWs into the audience. Miraculously, nobody was injured—it must’ve been the drugs. When the Dead stopped playing “Box of Cars,” Peter, Paul, and Mary crawled out from under the stage an joined the Dead in a rendition of “Puff the Magic Dragon.” The crowd went mad! Jerry Garcia shrunk back to his normal size and lit a foot-long spliff. Mary had to hold it with two hands to take a hit. The flying serape people started skywriting brief quotations from Nietzsche’s “Twilight of the Idols.” It was nearly too much for my head and I was only there for the last day of the concert. Those were the days.

But, after all that, I found solace in my room, just like The Beach Boys. I loved my room. It was so ironic that my father thought he was punishing me when he sent me to my room. It contained my soul. I had “special” magazines stored there under a seat cushion—“Sunbathing,” “Stag,” “Spree,” and more—very tasteful and artistic. Aside from contemplating my magazines, I wrote poems and played my electric guitar and sang. I liked Pink Floyd, but it was challenging with just one guitar. So, I would invite 5 or 6 friends over to jam. It drove my mother crazy so I switched over to the tambourine and got one for each of my friends. We were unique and actually played a couple of gigs as “The Tamborine Men” but we broke up over artistic differences.

The best thing about my room was laying on my bed with my hands behind my head thinking about things. Sometimes I would be worried about getting caught at my various scams. That would last less than a minute. Then, I would think about dinner or the war in Vietnam. I heard you could get out of the draft if you faked bone spurs. Supposedly, there was a doctor in NYC who would diagnose you for bone spurs if you gave him an extra $50.00. Then, I thought about God and dying. I jammed those thoughts out of my head. But God was especially vexing. I thought of God as just a word, but a word with every meaning of every word inside: tugboat, enema, checkers, beer—everything. In a restaurant, I once ordered “God, medium rare.” They brought me a steak.

If I had it to do over again, I would change everything, except. my magazine collection

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Paraprosdokian

Posted on June 27, 2023 | Leave a comment

Paraprosdokian: A figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase [or series = anticlimax] is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe the first part. . . . For this reason, it is extremely popular among comedians and satirists. An especially clever paraprosdokian not only changes the meaning of an early phrase, but also plays on the double meaning of a particular word.(1)

“I love you more than dirty socks.” The first time my girlfriend Gabby said this to me I got really really angry. Who the hell does not “love” anything more than dirty socks? I could love a duck or a mosquito bite more than dirty socks. But, I trusted Gabby, so I thought there might be a back story, that, once told would help me understand the connection between dirty socks and love. In the meantime I made a couple of “I love you more than” phrases, trying to catch the weirdness of Gabby’s. My first was “I love you more than a cockroach’s ass.” I said it to Gabby and she jumped on my lap and started kissing me. It was insane, but I enjoyed it. The next day I tried out: “I love you more than weed killer.” I got a reprise of the jumping in the lap and the kissing, with the addition of a 3-course meal for dinner: cream of truffle soup, free-range boar chops, and mango ice cream. I think it was the best meal I ever had.

Then, I screwed it up, I told her “I love you more than the Amazon Prime remote control.” All hell broke loose. She threw my cherished snow globe at me and barely missed my head, putting a dent in the wall. “You liar! You dirty stinking liar! I hear you talking to Siri in the middle of the night: ‘Siri, show me your Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.’ It is easy to see what that’s about, pervert.”

I was shocked by Gabby’s response, I needed to get to the bottom of things—it seemed there was an inverse ratio between my expressions of love and comparisons used to convey them: the more demeaning the more effective at inducing a positive response. So, to get the conversation going, I said to Gabby “I love you more than road kill.” She blushed and moved next to me on the couch. Then, I said, “I love you more than silver and gold.” She stood up, punched me in the nose, and stalked off to the bathroom and locked herself in. My nose was bleeding. So, I said through the bathroom door: “Honey, I need a tissue for the bloody nose. I love you more than the rotten cold cuts in our refrigerator meat drawer.” The bathroom door opened and there was Gabby with a damp tissue for my nose.

Finally, I was able to ask Gabby to explain her quirky “I love you” thing. We got the vodka down from the shelf and poured a couple of glasses. I had developed a fondness for warm Mr, Boston when I was an alcoholic back in the 90s. I took a big slug as Gabby started her story recounting growing up in Guam. Her father was an Air Force mechanic and her mother was a very inexpensive cut rate whore that had married Gabby’s father when she fell pregnant, knowing that her child (Gabby) could have belonged to 50-200 other men. but, she chose to marry Gabby’s father because he was less intelligent than her and she could easily boss him around.

I took another big gulp of vodka and was starting to fade. Gabby droned on: “When we moved to the US, mother couldn’t leave the whoring behind. Soon, our entire neighborhood was on her client list. When we saw our neighbor at the grocery store, he would grab his crotch and say ‘Wo, wo, wo!’ while he looked at my mother. My mother would tell me he had an itchy infection ‘down there’ that made him cry out. For some reason Dad did not care about mom’s whoring. I would see him counting cash at the kitchen table on Sunday mornings. One morning he looked at me and smiled and said, ‘Now I can get that ride mower down at Penny’s’. I admired dad’s attitude. It was clear that he loved my mother as she was: a whore that made a lot of money. He was grateful for his lawnmower. And of course, my mother was grateful for the lack of physical abuse in their relationship which was a primary gripe among her whore friends. The difference was they had pimps and my mother had a husband (at least that’s what she said). Then, one day out of nowhere my dad said to mother ‘I love you more than a toothache.’ Everything made sense now. My father loved my mother, but not much. But there was honesty in the comparison that ‘moons and stars’ could never achieve. And for example, the toothache comparison expresses a quality of certitude of the love that can’t be achieved with moons and stars . . .”

I interrupted to tell Gabby I was going to pass out and that we’d have to do this again real soon. Then, I threw up on the table. It smelled like Mr. Boston’s ass. Then, I fell off my chair and peed my pants. The last thing I remember was Gabby kicking me and saying softly to me: “You’re just like my father. I love you more than my schizophrenia and eczema combined.”

1. “Paraprosdokian.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 4 Jan 2008, 03:30 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 9 Jan 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraprosdokian>.

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Paregmenon

Posted on June 26, 2023 | Leave a comment

Paregmenon (pa-reg’-men-on): A general term for the repetition of a word or its cognates in a short sentence. Often, but not always, polyptoton.

Life, death, life, death, life, death. Does it really go on forever? What will I come back as? It is hard to even think about. I’m pretty sure my dog Skippy will come back as a dentist. He likes to chew on things, so reincarnating as a dentist is only natural. I had my teeth cleaned last week and the hygienist reminded me of Skippy with her barking out orders like “Wider!” and “Bite down!” and “Swish!” I felt like I should’ve brought a biscuit to shut her up. Then she administered the nitrous oxide. I’m not sure, but I think she climbed up on my lap and made whining sounds. Maybe it was just wishful thinking—she sure didn’t look like Skippy! Ha! Ha! With her long blond hair, she looked like an Afghan Hound.

I’m getting sidetracked. What would I, Vince Bengal, come back as? I think it works so you come back to work on something you were bad at in this life. So, if you couldn’t fix your car in this life, you would come back as a furnace repairman or a brain surgeon. My life has been a complete failure event. No wife. No children. No education. No conscience. The list goes on forever. Think of any admirable human trait and put “no” in front of it, and that’s me. It’s not like I’m Charlie Manson or Ted Buddy though. Charlie Manson was a murderous lunatic who liked to boss people around. I’m none of those things. Charlie may have reincarnated as the Pope. It’s possible! Ted is a different story. As a serial killer preying on young women, he has a lot to live down. He could be the Governor of Florida, especially with the Governor’s vendetta against Disneyworld—a hotbed of evils and transgressional employee clothing, where they dress as dogs and ducks, and worse.

So, what about me? This is harder than it seems. My first thought would be: Head of the FBI. I could fit in Herbert Hoover’s shoes. But, this is way in the future—it would be somebody else’s shoes. They would be my shoes. I would fight crimes and shoot at people. It would be great fun! I would specialize in fighting shoplifting, reviewing random CCTV footage of retail stores and food carts looking for crime: a stolen Taco or a pilfered pair of athletic socks. This is noble, unlike my current incarnation. I sell drugs to children in the housing projects. My ideal customer is 9-10 years old and gets his drug money from shoplifting and ‘reselling’ to the big guys who get their money from mugging women. It’s like the “great chain of being” some straight jerk told me about. I specialize in hard drugs, so I give the kids fair warning. Fentanyl is a real ass-kicker, and boy, do they love it. This is why I think I may be an anesthesiologist in my next life (if not Director of the FBI). Think about it. Instead of poisoning kids, I would be helping people: knocking them out without violence so they can be cut open painlessly. Or maybe, last but not least: I could be an airline pilot. I would literally get people high—in the sky! Ha! Ha! No harm done.

Uh oh! That’s a siren—it’s not the police—it’s the EMT mobile headed to scrape another kid off the sidewalk or a shooting gallery floor. I tell these kids to be careful, that they can die from this shit. That’s the extent of my responsibility. It’s like buying a handgun here in Florida: “This can kill somebody. Be careful.” What more can I do? Quit dealing? Ha! Ha! You’re joking.

POSTSCRIPT

The door flew open. It was Toby Griswold’s father and he had a gun. “My son OD’d on your shit drugs. It’s time for you to OD on lead!” BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! Vince was reincarnating on the floor as he was bleeding profusely, dying of three gunshot wounds to his chest. The great Karma Dove flew in the window and told Toby’s father that Vince was now a flatworm living in a host in South America. When the Karma Dove left, Toby’s father forgot the encounter, but remembered the message.

Vince was paying his cosmic debt for his wrongdoing. He was living in somebody’s intestinal tract outside Caracas, Venezuela. Normally, as Vince, he would be looking forward to Carnival, but he was a flatworm now. Vince was busy hunting for bacteria, as he went through life without an anus.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Pareuresis

Posted on June 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

Pareuresis (par-yur-ee’-sis): To put forward a convincing excuse. [Shifting the blame.]

I had gotten in the habit of saying “My ass” if I didn’t believe something that somebody said. For example: my wife said she was at the grocery store and I said “My ass” because she had been gone overnight. She told me she did it for me—that she slept in the parking lot when she heard they were getting a shipment of coconuts, and she knows how much I love them, so she camped out knowing they would out for sale when the grocery store opened in the morning—coconuts were tremendously popular in our small northeastern town. But, the coconut shipment story was untrue—unfounded rumor. There were no coconuts when she awoke. She was “deeply disappointed.”

I almost started crying when she told me her story, all night sleeping in the car! The dismay she must’ve felt—the anger, the frustration. Poor Hunny Bunny! I could hear my 15-year-old daughter laughing in the kitchen. I couldn’t figure out what was so funny, so I asked her. Her answer was “You!” meaning me. I had no idea what she was talking about. For some reason, I was her favorite joke. Anyway, I asked my wife out to dinner as a sort of reward for what she endured (there was more laughter from the kitchen). My wife said: “Oh honey. I’m so, so sorry. My vegetarian action group is holding an all-night vigil at MacDonald’s, picketing in the parking lot, handing out brochures and playing recordings of cows being slaughtered.” Wow! My wife was amazing. Too bad I was going to be working on my stamp collection and playing Rummy with our daughter. A big night!

I woke up around 2:00 am worried about my wife. She was so brave. I decided to take a drive down to MacDonalds. I woke up my daughter and told her what I was doing. She laughed.

When I got to MacDonalds it was closed and the parking lot was empty. I panicked and considered calling the police. But then, I figured I could wait until morning. My wife always had a good reason, especially for her overnight absences. I would wait until morning and if she didn’t come home, I would call the police. She came home around nine. She looked like she had just taken a shower—her hair was wet. So, I asked her where she was all night. As she started to tell me, my daughter giggled. My wife told me: “At the last minute we decided to go to Burger King. We targeted the Cheese Whopper with our chanting ‘I’ll have a Whopper in the garbage hopper.’” I was impressed. I asked her where she took a shower. She told me her old high school friend Rod ‘Ramrod’ Carbinski had graciously offered her shower, and a place to take a nap before she came home. My daughter was laughing again. But now I could see why. There was a pattern emerging that I could not deny: my wife was competing with me for the neighborhood’s “Top Notch Parent Award.” From her all-night coconut gambit showing our daughter how to love her man, to the social conscience displayed by the vegetarian protest. And also, the sacrifice of staying out all night, sacrificing time with her family to display her love and commitment to making the world a better place.

There was a knock on the door. It was Rod. He told me he was here to pick up my wife, that she was leaving me and “running off to chase our dreams.” My wife came down the stairs toting our big world travel suitcase. My daughter shot her with the handgun I’d left on the kitchen counter after I had blown a squirrel off the bird feeder. I called 911 and told them there had been a shooting. Then, I called Denise: “It finally happened—daughter off to prison no need for a divorce. I’ll explain later.” Rod was blubbering under the kitchen table.

My daughter was laughing.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu). Bracketed text added by Gorgias.

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Paroemia

Posted on June 24, 2023 | Leave a comment

Paroemia (pa-ri’-mi-a): One of several terms describing short, pithy sayings. Others include adage, apothegm, gnome, maxim, proverb, and sententia.

As I looked at the scar across my left hand and my permanently crossed fingers, I thought of the saying “Barking dogs don’t bite.” It was a little multi-colored mutt about the size of a muskrat. It was barking. I reached down to pet her and she tore into my hand. She would not let go. She just looked at me a growled, with my hand in a vise grip. After a half-hour, I was starting to get really worried. That’s when my friend called 911. He had a hard time convincing the dispatcher to send help. It wasn’t their typical fare—gunshot wound, flipped over SUV, choking Grandpa, guzzling Clorox, poked out eye, etc. This was different.

Soon, we heard the siren of the approaching ambulance. It squealed to a stop and the 2 EMTS burst through the front door. They could’ve just turned the doorknob, but they trained to smash through doors, to save time in “entering premises.” One of the EMTS tried not to laughs when he saw the dog hanging from my hand. He said, “Jeez, I didn’t think dogs came that little. He looks like a puppy.” I said, “Yeah, a puppy that’s been grinding away at my hand for the past hour. Where the hell have you been?” He said, “We were actually saving a women’s life. She was having trouble finding a towel to dry off with after her shower. We stopped Sear’s along the way and commandeered a bath towel. We got to her condo just in time to dry her off and keep her from slipping on the wet floor and dying. Then, we came here to deal with your joke bite.” He pulled a Jack out of his bag. The idea was to use the Jack to separate the dog’s jaws. It didn’t work. They couldn’t fit the Jack in the dog’s mouth. Then, they tried doggie treats. Didn’t work. Then, one of the EMTS said: “We’re gonna have to anesthetize the dog.” I yelled “Why the hell didn’t you do that in the first place?” “It’s called ‘triage.’ We start with the least effective treatment and work our way up. It case of the dog, if anesthesia does not work, the next step is to shoot it out in the yard. Don’t worry, the “euthanizer” has a silencer so your neighbors won’t be alarmed by the gunshot.”

The dog’s owner (my little sister) went berserk. She grabbed the dog, with my hand still attached, and hugged it to her. She was not going to let go. She swore they’d have to drag her out into the yard and shoot her too—she would die alongside Midgy. I was now a a car on a pain train. I was the locomotive. Midge was a passenger car, and my little sister was the caboose. I just wanted to leave the station—uncoupled from Midgy! it was a terrible analogy, but it worked for me under the circumstances.

It was time to inject Midgy. The needle was big, the dog was small—even though I was in pain, I had trepidations. In went the needle and Midgy went limp! I pulled my bleeding hand out of her mouth and literally jumped for joy. After seeing my ripped up hand, the EMTs gave me a shot of morphine for the pain. Meanwhile, Midgy was showing no signs of life. I did not want to be there when she kept not showing signs of life. However, I saw Midgy’s leg twitch as I went out the door, I hoped it was a sign of life. I could barely walk and had encased my wounded hand in a Wegman’s plastic bag so it wouldn’t drip on the floor. My girlfriend helped me to the car and we headed to the hospital to get me stitched up. As we entered the Emergency Room, the security guard asked me if the plastic bag was recyclable. I said I didn’t know. He said: “Ok. Sir, please remove the plastic bag. You may replace it with this paper bag. Don’t worry. There’s no charge.”

I was hoping this wouldn’t be like my last visit when I had a gallstone that could not have been more painful, but the doctors were concerned I was faking it because I wasn’t crying. Instead, I rolled around on the floor moaning while I was interviewed by a policeman from the narcotics division under the assumption that i was a drug addict faking a gallstone so I could get a fix. It was hell. I squeezed out a tear after 20 minutes and the interview was terminated. I got my painkiller.

Now, already high on morphine, I was led to my “outpatient” stitchers to get my hand fixed.

I walked through the door and there was a teen-aged boy sitting there in a Boy Scout uniform. The doctor told me his name was Billy Jackson and that Billy was 16 and was working on his First Aid merit badge. The doctor said, “He’ll sew you right up!” After the doctor helped him thread the needle, we were ready to go. Billy sprayed my hand with Lidocaine and jammed the needle in. I was so drugged up that I felt nothing at all. After he finished, Billy told me to keep it dry—to put it in a recyclable plastic bag when I took a shower.

I’m suing my little sister for what her dog did to me. She has insurance, so it is no big deal. I should probably sue Billy too—his stitch-job left my index finger and middle finger permanently crossed. I frequently get accused of insincerity when I make promises and people see my crossed fingers. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll go after Billy too. The Boy Scouts probably have some kind of merit badge insurance.

I’d like to say, “All’s well that ends well,” but I can’t. My poor little sister has started drinking. The 2 EMTs were convicted of burglary for stealing from unconscious victims. Billy was caught pilfering narcotics from the hospital, Midgy had puppies.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Posted in paroemia, Uncategorized

Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric, trope

Paroemion

Posted on June 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

Paroemion (par-mi’-on): Alliteration taken to an extreme where nearly every word in a sentence begins with the same consonant. Sometimes, simply a synonym for alliteration or for homoeoprophoron [a stylistic vice].

“Seven skillets sat sizzling—searing scallops—suddenly started smoking, then flaming like volcanos on the Mexican desert.” The quote is from Bonomo Fluenzia’s collected works titled “Blades of Gas.” He was devoted to writing incoherent books and essays. He felt it was paramount to cast off the desire to make sense and the struggles it entails that undermines human happiness with the never-ending quest for meaning—a mental illness known as hermeneutiosis, where you spend all your waking hours tied up in acts of interpretation. Fluenzia advises that you just write whatever spews into consciousness, paying no mind to verbs and adjectives, and all the other parts of speech that block creative writing’s freely flowing river of words—making them into marshes infested with mosquitoes and leeches.

Fluenzia believes that speaking in tongues is the paramount literary achievement. It’s incoherence is complete—so complete that is taken as the voice of God. Sitting and listening, and knowing you’re not expected to understand it, is relaxing, and affords you a glimpse of what life will be like on the other side, and an incentive to be born again and join the sheep at the river flowing to Jordan or Jersey City, the exalted hub of wonder and joy. Wonder and joy. Cheaper than New York—affordable housing, good clubs.

All of the above is the gist of a lecture I’ve given over and over to great acclaim. I am a professor “Words” at Alexander the Great Community College in Vester, MA. I am paid by the state, so I don’t put much effort into my professional life. There are so many regulations that I’m untouchable. Once, I ran over a student in Parking Lot B. I nearly killed her, but students are not permitted in Parking Lot B. I got off for “failure to see something that was not supposed to be there.”

Anyway, I am marked as a literary traitor. Fluenzia stands in opposition to the hoax called creative writing. Aligning my interests with his put me beyond critical evaluation by peers. As Fluenzia wrote: “Once opened the can cannot top the gong of swinging life, mud, and mayonnaise.” We do not need to know what this means—interpretation’s “other” takes pride in the bliss of nonsense and the alphabet’s inevitable “Z.”

POSTSCRIPT

Professor Trapp was convicted of arson for trying to burn down “Alexander the Great Community College.” Not very creative, as was most of what he did, Trapp used gasoline in an empty Clamato bottle. He stole the gasoline from the groundskeeper’s storage shed. He threw the flaming bottle into a urinal in the faculty restroom. A colleague quickly flushed the urinal, extinguishing the flames, and a thwarting Trapp’s plan. Trapp was sentenced to five years in prison where he watches “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood” and has a reading club with fellow inmates. They’ve just finished “Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship.” Next, it is their goal to read the entire “Nancy Drew” series.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

Buy a print edition of The Daily Trope! The print edition is entitled The Book of Tropes and is available on Amazon for $9.99. Also available on Kindle for $5.99.

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Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric, trope

Paromoiosis

Posted on June 22, 2023 | Leave a comment

Paromoiosis (par-o-moy-o’-sis): Parallelism of sound between the words of adjacent clauses whose lengths are equal or approximate to one another. The combination of isocolon and assonance.

“How many roads must a man walk down before he buys a car?” This is one of my best. I’m an amateur, but I’ve put a lot of time into studying ads. I’m in the used car business where advertising is like the Wild West—we have continuous advertising show-downs—mostly over interest rates, down payments, monthly payments and credit reports. It’s all in what we say—and never, never do we play. It is serious business selling used (aka previously owned) cars. I’ve been a shyster ever since I was 11 when I sold my “Radio Flyer” wagon to the neighbor boy for $10.00. When the front right wheel fell off, I showed him the guarantee I had made up—basically, it said there was no guarantee. I kept his money and there was nothing he could do.

The annual “Best Preowned Automobile Ad” competition is coming up in a couple of weeks. I have won it every year for the past ten years. This year, my brain has dried up, but I’m going give it a shot anyway. Maybe I’ll cheat. My first winning ad was “A white Sportcoat and a pink carnation, you need a car to get to the dance.” Teenagers whined to their parents—it was merciless. It got even crazier when we offered a free bottle of vodka with the purchase of every car. The parents snapped it up and martinis became popular and divorce rates for infidelity soared. There were divorces and remarriages all summer long. The streets were littered with empty vodka bottles and thrown wedding rice that birds were eating and exploding in flight.

All because of my ad! I was proud and weirded out at the same time, but I vowed to keep writing ads for “Tidy Rides.” The name emphasizes our commitment to selling cars that are tidy—minimal rust and smell good inside. The good smell is really important. Many of our cars come from auctions where they specialize in death traps—cars that people died in, but were not found for awhile, so there’s often a very very faint smell of decayed flesh. But these cars are so cheap, many decent men buy them for their wives for grocery shopping, picking up dry cleaning, and drag racing on Sundays. This shouldn’t be surprising. My wife has filled our mantle with trophies with little gold-colored plastic cars on top. She finds drag racing “self-fulfilling.” I don’t know what that means, but it keeps the peace. She drives a Chevy 2 with a Corvette engine.

Back to my ads. I’m really stuck this year and I probably won’t win. I feel like I’ve come to the end of the road. Hmmm. Road. “You can’t hit the road without a car.” Sounds like somebody getting ready to run away. Not good. What about this: “Life is a highway, but you need reliable transportation.” Pretty bad. “Time to trade your shitmobile for a tidy ride.” I like it!

I liked it, but nobody else did. It came in 102 out of 104. 104 was “Car, car c-a-r, stick your head in a jelly jar.” Whoever submitted that had guts. I met her at the awards banquet. The first thing I noticed was her belt buckle. It was made from a rear-view mirror from a ‘48 Caddy. She was wearing a hat made from a ‘64 Pontiac hood ornament—where Chief Pontiac glowed dimly through a golden lucite sculpture of his head. I was dumbstruck, but kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to give her any ideas. My relationship with my wife was bad enough already.

I couldn’t sleep. The thought of the “Car-Car” girl was driving me crazy. I got up and drove to the junkyard. It’s where I go when I’m troubled, I even had my own key to the gate. I was so much better off than the crushed and dismantled vehicles, it always made me feel good. Oh my god! There she was tearing the chrome strip off a Ford Fairlane. Then she started eating it! I was about to run, but she saw me! She smiled and walked toward me with the chrome strip in her hand. She said, “Car, car, c-a-r, stick your head in a jelly jar.” I ran. I had wet my pants, so I was in a hurry to get home. I never saw her again, but I couldn’t get the jelly jar thing off my mind. I even tried sticking my head in a jelly jar. It wouldn’t fit, but it left a circle of grape jelly on top of my head, like a crown.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric, trope

Paromologia

Posted on June 22, 2023 | Leave a comment

Paromologia (par-o-mo-lo’-gi-a): Conceding an argument, either jestingly and contemptuously, or to prove a more important point. A synonym for concessio.

“Ok. Ok. You’re right. Unlike me, you’re so astute you know what “astute” means. Your deductive reasoning is a descent into hell, but it is a logically consistent, correct, and properly rational hell.” This is what I said as I walked out the door, sick of being demeaned on a daily basis by my Philosophy Professor wife who had ground me down to a grain of sand during the course of our five-year marriage. The deeper she got into tenure, the more rude she became—affecting a barely discernible British accent when she demolished my latest opinion. I wanted out.

I was an Uber driver when we met. I had never gone to college, but I did graduate from high school somewhere near the bottom. I had stayed back a couple of times before I graduated. My father kept urging me to drop out so I would get a job and move out so he could rent out my room and “clean up on rental income.” So, I graduated.

After trying out a few jobs over the course of a year, I settled on Uber driver. In the interim, the worst job I had was washing pots and pans at “Romeos” Italian restaurant. They specialized in cheese-intensive dishes. The pots pans were hell to clean—I had to use a putty knife and garnet sandpaper to get the mozzarella and pecorino Romano to go away, with pots and pans submersed in 200-degree water, and me, wearing laboratory-grade rubber gloves and a pair of Speedo goggles.

Being an Uber driver was beyond wonderful in comparison to the pots and pans gig.

It was raining like holy hell. I got the message that there was a fare waiting for me in front of the University library. There she was standing under one of those big golf umbrellas, clutching her briefcase. She looked beautiful to me. She got in my cab. I knew where she was going—The Plastered Bastard Bar. It had a wild reputation. According to “Singles Magazine,” it was the number one hookup bar in the entire state. You were supposed to be able to say “Do you want to get laid?” to anybody without fear of making them angry. I was thinking of asking her, but it was strictly against Uber policy. She asked me: “Did you ever hear of Shrodinger’s cat?” Of course I had never heard of Schrödinger’s cat. I said, “No. Is it missing?” She laughed with the gravelly laugh that I came to hate, and said, “Sort of. He’s in a box and you do not know whether he is alive or dead. In fact, he could be alive and dead. As I’ve memorized it from the internet:”

“In Schrodinger’s imaginary experiment, you place a cat in a box with a tiny bit of radioactive substance. When the radioactive substance decays, it triggers a Geiger counter which causes a poison or explosion to be released that kills the cat. Now, the decay of the radioactive substance is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. This means that the atom starts in a combined state of ‘going to decay’ and ‘not going to decay’. If we apply the observer-driven idea to this case, there is no conscious observer present (everything is in a sealed box), so the whole system stays as a combination of the two possibilities. The cat ends up both dead and alive at the same time. Because the existence of a cat that is both dead and alive at the same time is absurd and does not happen in the real world, this thought experiment shows that wavefunction collapses are not just driven by conscious observers.” (https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/mobile/2013/07/30/what-did-schrodingers-cat-experiment-prove/)

“Holy crap,” I thought as I kept driving, “How in the hell did she memorize that. A dead cat? Jeez, she’s crazy.” She said, “I’m a Philosophy Professor. Do you want to get laid?” That did it. We went to her place. A small apartment near campus. There were large portrait pictures of men all over the walls. The weirdest was this guy with a giant mustache. “That’s Nietzsche” she told me “A Continental philosopher.” I had no idea what she was talking about, and didn’t care. I just wanted to get laid—and I did! She told me “as a thought experiment” she wanted to marry me. I was completely stunned, but not enough to say no. We got married in the Philosophy section of the University’s library. We spent our one-week honeymoon camping (with permission) in Ricard Rorty’s former parking space at the University of Virginia. Then, we went back to California.

She started making fun of me because I couldn’t spell epistemology. She laughed at me and called me a Neanderthal because I didn’t know what “the allegory of the cave” is. Eventually, I learned how to spell “epistemology” but she said it was “too late.” I knew the end was in sight when she bashed me in the head with the hard cover edition of Gadamer’s “Truth and Method.” It gave me a concussion. She said she was trying to prove an “ontological” point. While I was in the hospital, I called a divorce lawyer and got the ball rolling.

The grounds of divorce would be “Epistemic Incompatibility.” My lawyer, who had an undergraduate degree in philosophy, said: “Don’t worry. She’s originally from Crete, and we know they’re all liars.”

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Tagged elocutio, example, figures of speech, rhetoric

Paronomasia

Posted on June 21, 2023 | Leave a comment

Paronomasia (pa-ro-no-ma’-si-a): Using words that sound alike but that differ in meaning (punning).

“If you don’t pay your exorcist, you will get repossessed.” I always thought this was really funny. I would struggle every day to make a pun, but I failed. I was in a punsters club—“Pun Poppers”—and eventually got caught stealing puns from the internet, like the one above. I was fined 50.00 and banned from meetings for two months. To prove I was worthy for return, I had to make a pun that made the majority of the club’s members laugh. I was supposed read “my best” at the meeting when i returned. It was harsh, but I was determined to make my return, and make it triumphant.

I tried and tried and came up with a couple of crappy puns. Like: “What do you call a smelly drip. A leek.” And “I ate a donut hole for breakfast. I’m still hungry.” Then, I thought of the exorcist pun. Maybe I could find somebody who could summon the spirit of a great punster that I could learn from. I thought of Mark Twain’s “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” Egypt was a pretty shady place, populated by people with dog’s heads and things like that. Their pantheon of gods and goddesses was huge. I did some research and found there was a god of puns! His name is “Ho-Hup.” His collected puns written in hieroglyphics had never been translated. He had tons of followers including Cleopatra and Ramses II. Mark Antony was ill-disposed toward Ho-Hup because Cleopatra’s obsession with punning diverted her attention, and irritated him with her near-constant giggling at the god’s puns. Some historians argue that Antony planted the snake in her pants that killed her. This snake pun was found stuck to her cloak: “Why don’t snakes drink coffee? It makes them viperactive.”

The pinned-on pun was so bad that Ho-Hup sought vengeance. He had his minions plastered Cairo’s walls with terrible puns. A great groaning went up in the land, and arose in the city, and some people died. They choked to death as they read the bad puns, and their words got stuck in their throats. This was Ho-Hup’s revenge.

So, I’m off to Egypt. I have contacted an Egyptian named John who I found on the internet. He is a medium and claims that Ho-Hup’s spirit will be “a piece of cake” to summon and that Ho-Hup’s spirit could be easily persuaded to conduct a private seminar for me for an additional fee. It sounded too good to be true, but I paid the thousand dollars up front as required. John met me at the airport—he looked like he was Kansas or someplace like that. I wanted to say something, but I kept my mouth shut. Two days later, we were on camels on our way to “The Temple of Ho-Hup.” When we got to where the temple was supposed to be, there was nothing there—not a trace. John’s face went blank, his body stiffened, his eyes narrowed, and he asked: “Do black and white count as colors?” I said “What?” He said: “It’s a gray area.” John Smiled stiffly: “So a snake walks into a bar. The bartender says ‘How’d you do that?” John was on a roll: “When you can’t feel your abdominals it’s basically absence of your abs’ sense.” John’s punning went on for three hours. I got the sense that John was channeling Ho-Hup, although there was no way to prove it.

When I got home, I still stunk at punning, although I thought the $1,000 was well-spent. John’s three hour pun-a-thon was well worth it. It is too bad I don’t have the skill to do anything with it. But, I’m still trying. I donated $10,000 to Pun Poppers and they let me stay. I gave the money on the condition that I would by allowed to read one of my puns on Mother’s Day every year. The Board agreed. My first gambit was: “Mom, your tulips make me dizzy.” I was booed by everybody in the room, but I had kept up my end of the bargain, so my membership in Pun Poppers was secure.

I got this off the internet: “Ah, but a good pun is its own reword.” I am a fan. Although my interest will never cool. I am abscessed.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric

Parrhesia

Posted on June 20, 2023 | Leave a comment

Parrhesia (par-rez’-i-a): Either to speak candidly or to ask forgiveness for so speaking. Sometimes considered a vice.

Please forgive me, but your taste is tasteless. I’ve kept my mouth shut for as long as I could. Now that we’re here in Tahoe on our honeymoon, I ‘m gonna tell it like it is. This is the ideal time because our desire to be together is peaking. You’re still wearing your wedding dress, which looks like a scoop of coleslaw garnished by your head. I know you paid thousands for it—one of the biggest wastes of money in the universe. And, my God, your shoes looked like high-heeled locomotives. $400. Crazy! When you modeled your bathing suit, I almost threw up. It looks like a onesie you’d dress a baby in for bed. The only thing missing are the pablum stains down the front. I have no idea what color it is. Purple? Maroon? Brown? Jeez! Burn it! And please don’t wear sweatpants when we go out to dinner—especially the ones with your high school cheerleader logo—“The Leatherstocking Lepers” (“Leapers” spelled wrong—nobody ever caught it? Bizarre!)

Oh wait—the reception’s decorations. Why the hell did each place setting include a sponge and a nutcracker? What’s the message: our marriage is a mess that needs to be sponged up, and you’re going to crack my nuts? This kind of obscure symbolism is for Tarot card readers, not for newly married husbands and wives! Also, the wedding cake was rectangular 12”x 8” and 2” high. The icing tasted like soap suds. The pieces were the size of dice. It was awful. What we’re you thinking?

Now that we’re married, you are moving into my condo. It overlooks San Francisco Bay and I’ve lived there on my own for five years. You say you want to redecorate. I say “No!” If I turn you loose to make changes in the decor, I’ll probably have a seizure when I come home from work and look at it every evening. Besides, my sports decor suits me perfectly. Life-sized cutouts of the Giants’ lineup! Autographed gloves hanging on the wall. Swivel catcher’s mitt chairs in the living room. Dugout bench for a couch. Willie Mays tableware. Batter’s Box bed with matching home plate pillows. There’s more honey, but I can’t see why you would want to change it—even a tiny little bit. I even got you a pair of flannel Giants pj’s so you’ll fit right in—you and me in the dugout!

So, first thing when we get home, let’s get your looney hairdo revamped. It’s like you have a flying saucer on your head. I expect Martians to crawl out of your ears. Ha ha! You should get your hair done like my mother’s. Even though she has to use orange juice cans as curlers, it is so lovely when it is done. I think she calls it a “bouffant.”

Well, I could say a lot more about your poor taste, but I think I’ve said enough. Why are you packing? We don’t leave until Wednesday. Oh, I know—you’re gonna throw that stuff in a dumpster!

She hit him over the head with her suitcase, knocking him unconscious. She dug his wallet out of his back pocket while he lay there. She Googled “annulment” on her smart phone as she rode the elevator down to the hotel lobby.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric, trope

Pathopoeia

Posted on June 19, 2023 | Leave a comment

Pathopoeia ( path-o-poy’-a): A general term for speech that moves hearers emotionally, especially as the speaker attempts to elicit an emotional response by way of demonstrating his/her own feelings (exuscitatio). Melanchthon explains that this effect is achieved by making reference to any of a variety of pathetic circumstances: the time, one’s gender, age, location, etc.

I had lost my dog Pogo. I never should’ve let him out when they were picking up the garbage in front of my house. There was something about garbage that set Pogo off. I figured I could just follow the garbage truck and I’d find him, nose to the ground and barking his signature “boo-woo-woo” bark. I caught up with the garbage truck. Pogo wasn’t on the trail and he was nowhere to be found following the garbage truck.

I panicked. There was a good chance that Pogo had jumped up into the garbage truck’s hopper, been raked in, and compacted. It would be a fitting death for Pogo—assimilated to the garbage he so dearly loved: to become one with a half-eaten tuna casserole, left-over meatballs, an open jar of mayonnaise, coagulated gravy, rice and whatever else a garbage bag would hold: a garbage bag torn open and garbage strewn all over the back porch. I would get so mad at him. I would lock him in basement. I would consider having him put to sleep. But, I couldn’t do it. When he was a puppy, we fed him table scraps, and he developed an affection for them that was greater than his affection for us—he was addicted to tables scraps and we didn’t intervene. We just yelled at him and locked him in the basement. He would whine and I would yell “Shaddup mutt!” Now, he was likely dead in the back of a garbage truck.

The garbage man told me he’d be emptying the truck at the landfill at 4.30. He told me I was welcome to come and watch and see if my dog “fell out.” I was there when they started dumping. After about 20 minutes, Pogo came sliding out. He had a t-bone steak bone wedged in his mouth. I walked over to him to wrap him in the blanket I’d brought to bring him home in the trunk of my car and bury him somewhere in the back yard. In a way I was relieved—a major pain in the ass removed from my life: I tried to fight the feeling of relief, but I couldn’t. When I saw he was breathing, I cursed my luck. But I had no choice. He was my dog.

After thousands of dollars in vet bills, Pogo is 100%—100% pain in the ass as he’s always been, and he’s developed a new habit: dragging his butt across the living room carpet. We understand it’s worms and we’re taking him to the Vet to get a diagnosis and medication. This is life with our dog Pogo. I kick myself every day for not letting him die in the landfill.

I’ve built him a run in the back yard so we don’t have to let him into the house. As we anticipate his death from old age in a couple of years, we use words like “liberated” or “set free.”

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Perclusio

Posted on June 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

Perclusio (per-clu’-si-o): A threat against someone, or something.

The note taped to my front door said: “If you don’t stop it, I will make you pay.” I tore the note off my door. I crumpled it up and went inside where I flattened it out again on the kitchen counter along with the five other identical notes I had received that week.

I had no idea as to what I was doing that would be so objectionable to somebody that they would make me “pay.” I mean, the wildest thing I did was to have a vegetable garden in my back yard. It was 5X5 feet and had zucchini, tomatoes, and yellow squash growing in it. How could a fresh tomato induce a threat? I was definitely missing something. So, I had one of those video surveillance cameras installed over my front door. Anybody walking up the sidewalk would trigger the camera, making it record.

I was excited when I got up the next morning. I opened my door and there was no note! The camera had acted as a deterrent! I linked my Bluetooth to the camera for the heck of it, to see if there was anything there. What I saw shocked me! There was a really big raccoon ferociously battling with a man in black wearing a torn balaclava. I went outside and there was blood on the sidewalk. It couldn’t have been the raccoon’s because his opponent had no weapon. I’d never heard of a raccoon killing a parson, so I figured my taunter was still alive.

It was near noon, so I headed to Food Manger to get some pre-made tuna salad for lunch . It had chopped pickles and onions in it, and I loved it. As I walked up to checkout, I was shocked to see that the bag boy Rod’s face was covered with superficial scratch marks. “Ah ha!” I thought. “So how did you get those scratches?” I asked like a policeman. Rod said he had tripped and fallen into a rose bush, where the thorns had given him “a pretty good scratching.” I asked him what kind of roses they were. He stuttered and muttered “I don’t know.” I asked, “Have you ever had a fight with a raccoon?” He laughed nervously and dropped the bag he was filling. I yelled, “Answer me before I find that raccoon and ask hm!” I don’t know why I said that—I was trying to sound tough. He said, “No, no, no!” Then he said, “Ok. Ok. You got me. You caught me. I’ve been putting the threatening notes on your door.” There was only one thing I wanted to know: “Why?”

He told his story: “I wanted to win the ‘Lightening Bagger Award.’ I wanted to be the fastest bagger so I ignored the the lower rack on the shopping carts. Part of my job is to hoist up what’s on the rack so the cashier can scan it. It could cut as many as 20 seconds off my bagging time by ignoring it. But I noticed you had caught on to what I was doing. You were piling prime cuts of beef on your cart’s bottom rack., whereas, it was supposed to be used for kitty litter, bags of charcoal or potatoes—things that wouldn’t fit in the cart. Clearly, piles of expensive cuts of meat would fit. You exploited me. I got angry and started writing the notes. I was going to make you pay for the meat if you didn’t stop jeopardizing my winning the ‘Lightening Bagger Award.’”

I was shocked—there he was, nice little Rod, standing there with scabs all over his face. The Food Manger Manager Joseph was standing there and heard the whole thing. He told Rod to get rabies shots—they would be covered by Food Manger’s health insurance plan.

Rod kept his job, but was put on five years probation, and moved to the back warehouse where he opens boxes of canned goods, monitored by CCTV. I am making restitution in lieu of serving an 18-month sentence in state prison. Rod was able to remember all the meat I pilfered—it’s like he’s some kind of grocery check-out idiot savant.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Periergia

Posted on June 17, 2023 | Leave a comment

Periergia (pe-ri-er’-gi-a): Overuse of words or figures of speech. As such, it may simply be considered synonymous with macrologia. However, as Puttenham’s term suggests, periergia may differ from simple superfluity in that the language appears over-labored.

“There was a time when the flowing juices of riper moments squeezed their promise onto waiting heads, waiting to be anointed by tomorrow’s sweet juices, cleansing history’s smut from the future.”

I think Francis Gumnuts was the greatest poet ever. The quote above is from a little-known work of his published in 1666 at the height of the plague epidemic in London. It is titled “Fever.” The quoted lines have been interpreted as a paean to pustules, trying to see them in a positive light and give people covered by them a ray of hope. Another favorite of mine is “Bird Droppings.” Gumnuts is sitting on a log by a lily pond musing on a patiently fishing Crane quietly waiting, not moving, waiting for a minnow or a sunfish to swim by, when suddenly, a large flock of noisily cawing crows flys overhead, raining guano, hitting Gumnuts several times on the head and soiling his doublet with “chalky whitish goo.” He wrote: “The dozing day was passing as the slender crane concentrated upon a feast—a sunfish or a minnow blatantly sought by a blade like beak glinting yellow like a frozen bolt of burning light. And then! And then! And then! A company of raucous crows doth mount the air above my head—a darkness-forming horde of feathered demons. Now, they crap. They poop. They shite. A devil’s cloudburst of guano raining everywhere, beating down upon my head, soiling my doublet, knocking down the hapless crane. The flock passed and I looked around. The world was cloaked in white. ‘Twas like fresh fallen snow on a pristine winter’s morn. The guano was a gift so beautiful, I could not help but cry.”

Wow! Shite to snow! Gumnuts had a gift—he could wrest good from evil. His muscular transformations show how personal effort can make the world anew—shite is only shite because you want it to be, even when you step in it and it smells up your shoe. The use of euphemisms is especially helpful as a powerful instrument of reality’s transformation. For example, “poo-poo,” and “doo-doo”:smooth out shite, and “bun” speaks to its similarity to a jelly donut or a cruller. Although it still may be shite, it’s creative renaming bolsters an attitude shift, enabling a more positive quality of experience at the sight and smell of shite. After the Stoics, Gumnuts lived in accord with what he called “interpretive beneficence,” living out his final years in a hollowed out heap of garbage. Followers of his would drive by in their carts and shovel fresh trash on his “Stately Garbage Dome.”

This is all pretty remarkable. What’s most remarkable is Gumnuts’ obscurity. I’m a graduate student at Cargo Docks University in Utrecht. I am writing my doctoral dissertation on Gumnuts’ use of words to say things. My first, and most bizarre, discovery, is that Gumnuts’ early manuscripts are written in Japanese, which leads me to think he may have travelled to Japan. His first extant manuscript, which hasn’t been translated, is his lengthiest manuscript. The title page has a sketch of what looks like a flop-eared hamster with a meat cleaver for a tail. The manuscript is titled “Pikachu.”

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Posted in periergia

Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric

Period

Posted on June 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

Period: The periodic sentence, characterized by the suspension of the completion of sense until its end. This has been more possible and favored in Greek and Latin, languages already favoring the end position for the verb, but has been approximated in uninflected languages such as English. [This figure may also engender surprise or suspense–consequences of what Kenneth Burke views as ‘appeals’ of information.

In spite of being solid, shiny and new, the tuck was parked by the side of the road in the middle nowhere with no driver, no passenger, no nothing, like it had broken down and been abandoned. I slammed on my brakes, stopped and backed up. I got out of my truck and walked toward the abandoned truck. I heard the engine running. I opened the door and looked inside the cab. I tried to turn the engine off, but the key wouldn’t budge. I wondered how long it had been there—the gas gauge said full and the air conditioning was blowing on high. There was a copy of Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” on the seat along with a handwritten map. I had had a brief brush with Nietzsche in college in a philosophy course titled “Thinkers Who Destroyed Western Civilization.” I addition to Nietzsche, we read Rorty, Plato, L. Ron Hubbard, and Gadamer. There were a few more we studied , but I can’t remember them. After reading Hubbard’s “Dianetics,” I joined the Church of Scientology, became clear, and rose to rank of Ensign in the Scientology navy, but I quit. The navy didn’t even have a boat and I found that off-putting.

As I sat there in my truck, I had the same old conflicted feelings about my life’s trajectory. 5 wives. 9 children. Currently unemployed. Wandering.

I looked out the abandoned truck’s windows. The terrain was perfectly flat for miles around. I saw a couple of antelope off in the distance, but no people. I was perplexed to the max—most perplexing was the fact that I couldn’t turn of the truck’s engine. I picked up the map and flattened it out on the truck’s hood. It was titled “Golden Gulch.” I thought with a title like that it must be a treasure map! All the roads and trails on the map looked like tangled yarn. It was a fuzzy mess. I noticed the map was subtitled “Curse Me.” I thought for a second and then said “Damn you!” I could feel the map suddenly wiggle under my hand. I jumped back and watched the map transform itself into crystal clear rendition of our location—including the mystery truck in the lower right hand corner. I was amazed and frightened. Then I saw it—there was a route from the truck’s location to an “X” with the word “gold” written alongside it.

I put the map back on the seat and went to get a cigarette from my truck. The abandoned truck started moving! I prayed for guidance and got none, so I jumped in my truck and followed the abandoned truck. Surely, it was following the map to the gold. We set off across the prairie. I shifted into 4-wheel drive as we started to pick up speed. We were going 25, 35, 50, 60, 70, 80 mph. It was insane, but I couldn’t get the gold out of my mind. In the span of a couple of hours, I had become obsessed. I had become insane.

I heard an alarm dinging. I was going to run out of gas. Then, I ran out of gas. The abandoned truck slowed down, blew its horn, and kept on going. I smacked the heel of my hand on my steering wheel. I got out of my truck and kicked it. Then I realized that was stupid. I went to call AAA, but there was no phone service. I had to walk. Our trucks had left indentations in the grass and flattening a trail I could follow. It took me four hours to get back to the highway when my cellphone service resumed. The AAA driver brought me food and water—well worth my membership fee. He brought two Jerry cans full of gas. We emptied them into my truck’s fuel tank. I was driving myself back to town to get fueled up and check into a motel for a shower and a good night’s sleep. I looked in my rear view mirror. It was the abandoned truck and it was gaining on me fast—it must’ve been going over 100 mph.

I pulled over. It roared past. I never saw it again.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu). Bracketed text inserted by Gorgias.

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Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric

Periphrasis

Posted on June 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

Periphrasis (per-if’-ra-sis): The substitution of a descriptive word or phrase for a proper name (a species of circumlocution); or, conversely, the use of a proper name as a shorthand to stand for qualities associated with it. (Circumlocutions are rhetorically useful as euphemisms, as a method of amplification, or to hint at something without stating it.)

I didn’t know what to do. The big round yellow ball in the sky was about to set me on fire. I swear, digging potatoes should be a job for dogs. Here I was in Idaho, a boy from New Jersey—from the Jersey Shore. I had read the ad for potato diggers in “True Stories” magazine—my primary source of information about the world. I had just finished reading a story about a man who only ate barbed wire. It was shocking. I turned the page and there it was. “Home, home on range, where the deer and the tubers play. Spend your day off at Yellowstone National Park! You will dig potatoes. You will dig Idaho!” There was a photo of a giant potato floating on a spewing geyser. I was sold!

I wondered how we would dig up the giant potatoes. Would it just be us with shovels, or would we be assisted by bulldozers. I was thinking these thoughts as I fell asleep on the train to Boise. As an amateur poet, I wrote “An ode on a Giant Potato” when I woke up in the morning, before I headed to the dining car, were I ordered scrambled eggs and home fries. I asked the waiter if the home fries were from Idaho. He just looked at me and shook his head like he pitied me.

When the train arrived at the station, there was a man with a sign that said “Potato Ranch.” A group of us assembled around the man. He said, “Please place your wallets and all forms on I.D. In the canvas bag. This is a mere formality. Just do it.” I threw my wallet into the bag. My mother given it to me for high school graduation. It was hard to let it go. I asked, “When do we get to go to Yellowstone?” The man told us he was sorry—the Yellowstone thing was a misprint in the job ad. He told us it is 600 miles north of the potato ranch, and impossible to travel to in summer when the roads are jammed with tourists. He said, “Get on the truck, and hurry.” I climbed up on the flatbed truck and off we went. It was about a half-hour trip banging around on the truck’s bed. My butt was really sore when we got to the ranch. The next thing we had to do was sign our contracts. There were two men with guns standing by the table. I signed a document pretty much making me an indentured servant.

I looked around and saw the 25-foot high electrified fence surrounding the Potato Ranch compound, There were a couple of dead crows hanging from the wire. Their wings were charred and their feet were missing—there were charred stubs where their feet used to be. One more thing: We were told that we’d be “watched over” at night, to keep us safe from the “Indians” who spent their evenings getting drunk and luring people from Potato Ranch to pow wow. They have a primitive hair salon where they take their unfortunate prisoners and have aspiring native hair stylists practice cutting their hair, using tools made from Buffalo bones and charging $9.00 for a trim and $12.00 for a full styling, which includes a bear grease “flat down” and a smoked doe skin do-rag. Given Potato Ranch’s electric fortifications, I couldn’t be sucked in by the “watched over” story—clearly, the fence was designed to keep us in, and clearly, if they actually existed, the Indians were friendly.

So, here I am out in the field digging potatoes. There are no giant potatoes; just giant blisters on my hands. “Potato Ranch” is a nightmare. But, I found out through the grapevine that the ranch is owned by the McDonald’s hamburger empire. I wrote a letter to Ronald McDonald describing the unconscionable, and probably illegal, working conditions at Potato Ranch. I was able to sneak the letter to the post office via one of the “Fun Women” brought in for the executive staff’s “entertainment” on Saturday nights.

One week later a helicopter landed on the quad, and Ronald McDonald stepped out! He said something to the Boss, and the boss pointed me out—I had foolishly signed my name to the letter. As he came toward me, I smiled and waved to him. He grimaced. I noticed the Hamburglar had stepped off the helicopter too. He was carrying a crowbar and had a menacing look on his face. I ran for the helicopter, grabbing the Hamburglar’s crowbar as I as I ran past him and jumped into the helicopter. I held the crowbar over the pilot’s head and yelled “Get me the hell out of here or your head’s a cracked egg.” Ronald McDonald shook his fist as we took off.

When we landed in Boise, the police were waiting for me, to arrest me. I told the pilot that the cracked head thing still stood if he didn’t talk to the police. He talked, and the police let me go. I went back to Jersey where I parlayed my Idaho potato experience into a job picking tomatoes on a truck farm. Eventually I received a huge settlement from a class action suit against Potato Ranch and McDonalds. I purchased a cranberry bog in South Jersey and named it “Waders.”

I have nightmares about Ronald McDonald, but I know he’s doing time in a federal penitentiary. The franchise was dissolved to cover legal expenses and the trade name McDonalds was was banned. A Chinese company bought all the assets and reopened under the name MacaDownells. I still eat at the McDonalds remnant for two reasons: I love Big Macs with cheese and I carry a magic marker and write obscenities on the statues of Aiguo Macadownell (who looks identical to Ronald McDonald) standing by the entranceways.

As you can imagine, I will never eat the French fries ever again. In fact, I have to put in a mighty effort when I’m at MacaDownells to keep from hopping the counter and grabbing a handful of frozen fries and throwing them on the floor.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Posted in periphrasis

Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric

Personification

Posted on June 14, 2023 | Leave a comment

Personification: Reference to abstractions or inanimate objects as though they had human qualities or abilities. The English term for prosopopeia (pro-so-po-pe’-i-a) or ethopoeia (e-tho-po’-ia): the description and portrayal of a character (natural propensities, manners and affections, etc.).

My “Biltong Billy’s Biltong Cookbook” was telling me it was time to say goodbye. I had bought the cookbook in the airport gift shop in Johannesburg, South Africa. They fed you Biltong on all the domestic flights, and I got to like it. It provided a good jaw workout that kept my aging face toned. I was snagged by customs at JFK, I had a tiny piece of Biltong in my briefcase. That was a no no. No meat allowed!

I had to wait in a room with other customs busting miscreants. One guy had what looked like a coffin wrapped in plastic wrap. There was another guy, or I should say, creature, who looked really strange. He had huge hands and feet and was breathing from a Bachman pretzel canister. The customs agent called my name and told me I was free to go. He was holding my little scrap of Biltong and, with a smug look on his face, popped it in his mouth as I walked past him. One more reason to cheat on my income taxes, I thought to myself as I headed for the taxi queue. I saw the man with the plastic-wrapped coffin. He was picked up by a Ryder truck, and they took off, burning rubber.

I got home around 11.00 pm and started to unpack. That’s when it started. My Billy Biltong s cookbook was leaning in my briefcase. It was like it was saying “Let’s get started.” The next day I went to the butcher’s and bought 10 lbs of bottom round beef. I was on my way.

Let me jump ahead—I went Biltong crazy. I had 40 2.5 gallon ziplock bags full of Biltong relaxing in the cool air of my basement. That’s a lot of Biltong. Not to be deterred, I tried to give bags away to my friends. When I told them what it was, none of them wanted it. Then, one day I was walking in the park and a dog that had gotten off its leash ran up to me and started clawing at my pants pocket where I had stashed a chunk of Biltong to snack on while I walked.

This was a major breakthrough. Biltong dog treats! I got a Go Fund Me grant and started to roll. I gave the treats a straightforward name: “All Beef Biltong Dog Treats.” I added “From Jo-Burg to Your Burg.”

I sold the dog treat business two weeks ago for $12,000,000, but I’m not ready to retire yet. I’m wracking my brain to come up with a new product—I even thought of trying frozen roadkill dinners. I envisioned a fleet of small snowplows that would scrape the flattened animals from the pavement. Most people I polled thought the idea was disgusting. Then, I read this on the internet: “While it may not be for the faint of heart, Peruvian guinea pig on a stick (also known as cuy al palo) has captured the attention of many.” Well, we go into production next week. We have one rule: No naming of the guinea pigs. The “pigs” are precooked and come frozen on a stick, microwave-ready. The box has a drawing of a smiling guinea pig dressed as a peasant playing the drums with two wooden skewer sticks. We broke our own rule and named him Machu Picchu.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)

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Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric

Polyptoton

Posted on June 13, 2023 | Leave a comment

Polyptoton (po-lyp-to’-ton): Repeating a word, but in a different form. Using a cognate of a given word in close proximity.

I took the metro to the hospital. I was wearing my Kevlar vest. The fleet of police cars had been sidelined due to a recall for sirens that exceeded OSHA sound parameters. Cops were going deaf and it was Sam’s Sounds’ “Whoop Whoop Pull Over 26” that was the culprit. It was manufactured in American Samoa where rules were loosened to help their economy. Usually, the sirens were tested on rats. If the rats’ ears bled, the siren was rejected. Our city’s Samoan police car sirens had not been tested. We now had a police force with impaired hearing. “What?” was the most frequently said thing at the Station or out in the field. For example, “Man down!” would elicit a “What?” This resulted in a significant jump in police and bad guy fatalities. The Department was due for hearing aids once the lawsuit was settled with with Sam’s Sounds, who would probably go out of business. In the meantime, a number of officers had taken to carrying small plastic funnels and sticking them in their ears when conversing. However the funnels were useless when handcuffing a perpetrator or beating him on the head with a truncheon. There were also the comedic moments when an office would mishear,. For example, an arresting officer would bring bring in a perpetrator and say “We’ve got a new guest” to the desk sergeant. The desk sergeant would hear “breast” instead of “guest.” And respond “What? Breast?” and everybody would laugh, most of them not knowing why, because they didn’t hear the desk sergeant’s response.

It was a total mess.

I had been on “medical” leave when the new sirens had been installed, so I missed their effects on my ears. In retrospect, my running around the Station in my underpants for three days making mooing sounds was a blessing. Now, as the “last man standing” the Chief had dispatched me to the hospital to apprehend a “shooter” who had killed several people with a blowgun with poison-tipped darts. When I got off the METRO, everybody on the platform wanted to know “Who will kill the killer?” I said “Me” and pulled out my service revolver.

When I entered the hospital, I immediately saw the shooter coming toward me with his blown-gun to his lips. He was not a very tall man. He had a Beatles-type haircut, no shirt, was wearing what looked like a kilt made out of hay, and penny loafers with white socks. I saw him start to inhale, so I shot him, unloading my revolver into his torso. I was pretty sure he was dead, but I reloaded and shot him six more times. I received the “No Collateral Damage Award” for not killing any innocent bystanders during the execution of my duties at the hospital. There was a ricochet that killed a service dog, but that didn’t count.. I got a pay raise too.

We found out that my victim was an Anthropology professor from Straight Line Community College. He had gone crazy and was obsessed with testing the blowgun he had obtained in Sri Lanka on his most recent research expedition—he purchased it at the airport gift shop and was concerned that it was just a cheap knock-off. Saying that he had “morals” he targeted “really sick” people at the hospital. Well, we decided he was “really sick,” and that terminating him was permissible, or “All in a day’s work” as we say here at the Station, or “All in a day’s wok” as many of my colleagues would hear it.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)

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Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric, trope

Polysyndeton

Posted on June 12, 2023 | Leave a comment

Polysyndeton (pol-y-syn’-de-ton): Employing many conjunctions between clauses, often slowing the tempo or rhythm. (Asyndeton is the opposite of polysyndeton: an absence of conjunctions.)

I put on my socks, and my pants, and my shirt, and my belt, and my running shoes. It didn’t matter how far, or where to, I ran. My name is Victor and I am a jogaholic. I became a jogaholic when I was on the Albert Cramer High School track team. I ran the fifty yard dash, sort of like drag racing with your feet. I started running to the bus stop. I’d always get a window seat toward the front. I wore my jogging shoes constantly, only taking them off to scratch my athlete’s foot and rub on some EMUAID— a special blend of Emu fat, and watermelon juice, and floral scents—rose, peony, and jasmine.

At school, I ran to my classes. Once, I slammed into my wood shop teacher and a pint bottle of vodka fell out of his shop coat and broke on the floor. He made me clean it up. When I ran to the trash can with the broken shards of glass, Billy Stricken tripped me and I had to run to the school nurse’s office with a bleeding hand. She gently and firmly told me that I am a jogaholic. My running everywhere was a clear sign that I was afflicted. As I ran to the playground, I was hit with a sense of relief. Prior to my diagnosis, I thought there was something wrong with me because there was nothing wrong with me! All my friends were “sick” in some way. Marcy was cross-eyed. Tim still wore diapers. Melanie had a mustache. Reggie was a bed-wetter. Billy was schizophrenic, Fern had total-body eczema. Freddy wore rubber gloves. Suffice it to say, the list of maladys goes on and on, and on.

So, given the company I was in, I saw no reason to seek a cure. But the school reported my affliction to my parents, who had always been aware that something was so-called “wrong” with me.

As I was running from the bathroom to the living room, my father yelled “Stop!” He was holding a pair of lead deep sea diver boots. Each one weighed 20 pounds and they were designed to help keep the diver under water. My father told me to put them on. I did.

I could barely walk, let alone run. My father told me as long as I lived under his roof, I would wear the diver’s boots everywhere. I had trouble climbing the stairs to go to bed that night. But, when I got to my room and took off my boots, I ran around my room, wearing my cherished running shoes. I felt free.

On graduation day, to my father’s great sorrow, I removed my diver’s boots and donned my running shoes. I ran to the stage to receive my diploma and grabbed it like a baton in a relay race and kept on going. My dysfunctional and differently-abled friends cheered confirming my commitment to living as a jogaholic. Billy even waved his medication bottle over his head.

After running around aimlessly for a few years, I landed a job as a pinch runner for the Lancaster Roadrunners, a minor league baseball team. I love running out onto the field when I’m called to steal a base, or just run them. I have gotten married to a wonderful woman who has come up with creative ways to manage my malady. For example, she straps me into a wheelchair when we go shopping. We get a better parking place, plus I can’t run away. I’d wear my diver’s boots to the mall, but they are very tiring and too slow. However, both my wife and I wear diver’s boots at home. We move in slow motion around the house like a couple of sloths in love.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)

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Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric, trope

Procatalepsis

Posted on June 11, 2023 | Leave a comment

Procatalepsis (pro-cat-a-lep’-sis): Refuting anticipated objections.

I know you’re going to tell me it shouldn’t be done, that it can’t be done, that it won’t be done. I’ve been listening to nay-sayers all my life. So far, they’ve been right, except perhaps, when when I cleared the haunted house with a vacuum cleaner—a brand new Hoover that I got a generous grant to purchase from our beloved St. Limo University. $120.00. A small price to pay to be cleared of poltergeists. It was the Dean’s house that was making trouble. I vacuumed his house from ceiling to floor, from attic to basement—every nook and cranny, every square inch. I played Kraftwerk’s “Show Room Dummies” over and over too. I felt the Dean’s ghosts might be of French origin and be repelled by Kraftwerk’s German accent. Our university is in very close proximity to Quebec, being located in North-Central New York on the Canadian border. We soon discovered that the ghostly sounds were coming from a loose cold water pipe in the basement. I still had $200.00 in my research account which the Dean “reappropriated” to help offset the cost of his University-sponsored 25th wedding anniversary. I was instructed to give my Hoover to the Dean’s wife so she could “continue my researches” in their house.

Now, you are all probably wondering what’s next for me here at St. Limo University. You should be sure, given my recounting of the success of my “Ghost Sucker” in certifying the absence of ghosts in the Dean’s residence. So your mockery and complaints will fall on deaf ears. So don’t try to censure me—especially you jerks in the English Department. It is shameful that you write poems—poems about trees, depression, fixing motorcycles, opium, and veiled sexual references to your mothers and fathers. Your longer works are just extended meditations on the same filthy poetic topics—more vulgar, detailed, meaningless and disgusting in their long form. I’m surprised you haven’t been featured in a documentary on the depravity of English Departments.

Ok, my next project. I will be amputating one of my fingers (including my thumbs) each month for the next ten months. Once all my digits are removed, I will research the human behavior known as “pounding.” Finger-free, I will be positioned to pound on things for longer periods of time, giving more opportunities to study the phenomenon. I will have a control pounder, a student with whom I can make comparative observations and analyses and seek comfort with at the end of each day, pounding together. In addition, my nephew, who works in a shipyard in Maine, has made me a pounding board out of maple, cherry, and oak—the holy Trinity of pounding boards. The pounding board is like a pounder’s pitch pipe. Roughly, maple makes a pounding sound that sounds like a fat man falling oh his belly on a slate floor, Cherry expresses the sound of a person being beaten on the face by a leek. Oak is in a league all its own, sounding as it does like a physically fit person carrying 2 bags of groceries being run over by a subcompact car at 5 miles per hour. These are the foundational sounds of pounding. All pounding is a variation on maple, cherry and oak, properly wielded, properly attuned.

When my pounding study is complete, and I am left bereft of thumbs and fingers, I intend to wear surgical gloves filled with sand. I will also be filing a lawsuit against St. Limo University for allowing me to mutilate myself. Oh, Dean Smudge, you have a question? “No, I have a request. Stay where you are. Campus Security is on the way. They’re going to take you to a quiet place with bars where you can think up more great research projects,” the Dean said with through his University Events Bullhorn.

I was amazed and disheartened by what was going on.. After all, I had given my vacuum cleaner to the Dean’s wife.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric

Protherapeia

Posted on June 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

Protherapeia (pro-ther-a-pei’-a): Preparing one’s audience for what one is about to say through conciliating words. If what is to come will be shocking, the figure is called prodiorthosis.

“Here we are, gathered in Mom’s living room. Thanks for coming and being willing to listen, and hopefully, respond with grace and forgiveness to what I’m going to tell you. It has been tremendously difficult holding this back all these years. Dad abandoned us when I was seven. That was 20 twenty years ago. Well, dad didn’t abandon me. When he left he told me where he was going, and to promise to never to tell you. He said he had to leave because Mom and the twins were ‘assholes.’ Huey was too young to earn his ire, so dad had nothing to say about his role in his departure. Oh, he hated our dog Struggles too—he hated feeding Struggles and taking him for walks and having to pick up his poop.”

As soon as I finished Barton, one of the twins, charged at me and knocked me to the floor and started punching me in face yelling “traitor, traitor, traitor.” I fought back and managed to stand up. I called Barton a lot of names and then told him, and everybody else, that I had intended to tell them where dad is all along. Barton made a half-assed apology and we shook hands.

I told them: “Dad’s our next door neighbor. For five years he had surgery on his face. It made him into a different-looking person and now he lives next door! I am breaking a big trust here. Although he’s living next door, he does not want you to know it’s him. He just wants to be close to his family in his final years. It is very sad, but very true. So, leave him in peace.” I knew they wouldn’t as they stalked out the door with angry looks on their faces, I followed them. Barton pounded on the door yelling “Open up you bastard.” The man inside asked: “What do you want?” Mom yelled: “You abandoned us. You ruined our lives.” The man in the house peeked out a crack in the door: “You’re crazy. Go away before I call the police.” “I told you he would deny everything,” I said. The family went back to Mom’s house mumbling curse words and swearing to “get” Dad—maybe even burn down his house.

It was getting late, so I went home. When I got home I called Dad. We had a good laugh. Dad said, “That poor guy next door. Eventually, those assholes will probably force him to give fingerprints and DNA.”

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric, trope

Protrope

Posted on June 9, 2023 | Leave a comment

Protrope (pro-tro’-pe): A call to action, often by using threats or promises.

“Hi Ho! Hi Ho!, it’s off to work we go. Off to the salt mines, or I’ll stick a hot butter knife you know where, and it isn’t in a butter dish. You have one minute to get out there and toe the line, or I start shooting. I am your God, but I am not your savior. Ok, time’s up.” BLAM! BLAM! BLAM, “A trifecta! Three malingerers. Three stooges. Rub-a-dub-dub, load ‘em in the tub and dump ‘em in the lime pits. If you want their shoes or anything, you have my permission to fight over them.”

Mr. Jones, the guard, was a psychopath. Prior to the “Change,” he had run an award-winning day care center called ”Little Sprouts.” After the “Change” he was cited for “grooming” children by feeding them nutritious lunches and waiting with them at the school bus stop. His accuser was a Floridite minion who took over “Little Sprouts” the same day Mr. Jones was convicted and transported to the salt mines. The new owner/principal of “Little Sprouts” renamed it “Sparta Day School.” Like ancient Spartans, the children wore no clothes and fought over everything—from lunch to Legos. If they weren’t wounded somehow during the day, they were spanked in private in the new principal’s office to “shield them from prying eyes and build their character.”

Mr. Jones’s descent into a homicidal mindset and wanton killer was nearly inevitable. If he didn’t kill laggards, he would be killed after being tortured in front of everybody. He was given a vivid detailed description of how he would be tortured that he was required to read aloud every morning through a bullhorn at 6:00 am. After the reading was the call to “toe the line.” If he had no malingers on a given morning he would shoot at a random victim, wounding them in the leg, and hoping he wouldn’t be tortured for not killing them. So far, the wounding strategy had worked.

The Charlie Manson Salt Mines were a horror show. You should’ve gathered that by now. Since the “Change” prompted by the “Floridite Coup,” when democracy died and thugs took over governance and law enforcement at every level. All US citizens were required to have a minimum of 6 tattoos depicting death and destruction, and including at least one tattoo of “The Joker.” Lying was valorized to the point that there was the equivalent of a Nobel Prize awarded for “Consistent and Credible Misrepresentation of the Truth.” Everything belonged to the government, including your home and car, which you had to rent from the government. Freedom of Speech was non-existent. Dissenters could be shot on the spot. Liberal gun control laws, along with stand your ground, encouraged killing dissenters. If you were annoyed by what they were saying, you were being threatened and you could let them have it, standing your ground. They didn’t have a chance. Dissent vanished.

I ended up in the Charles Manson Salt Mines, here in Utah, over a misunderstanding. I was suffering from my summer allergies and had sneezed several times in succession. A women pushing a baby stroller yelled, “He said the “F” word! He’s trying groom my baby and give me a lewd hint of what he’d like to do with me. Lock him up, Officer.” When I got to court, I tried to explain to the judged. that it was a sneeze—“Achoo” not “F-you.” The judge said, “While I commend you for coming up with a pretty good lie, I’m convicting you of public sullification, a new crime developed to enable courts to send off anybody they want to to the Charlie Manson Salt Mines. In your case, you bothered my niece with your obscene and immoral sneezing. I hereby sentence you to 10 years hard labor.”

So here I am. It all happened so fast. My teeth are falling out. I’m still wearing the Brooks Bother’s suit I was wearing when I was convicted and transported. It smells and is stained, with holes in the knees and elbows. I won’t talk about my underwear. Ironically, my hair and beard look like Charlie Manson’s. We have a look-alike contest each year that I’m thinking of entering. If I win, I’ll be made into a trustee at the Manson Memorial Museum at the Spahn Ranch. if that doesn’t work, I will ask Mr. Jones to shoot me.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric, trope

Proverb

Posted on June 8, 2023 | Leave a comment

Proverb: One of several terms describing short, pithy sayings. Others include adage, apothegm, gnome, maxim, paroemia, and sententia.

When I was fourteen, I was scared, lonely, lacking in confidence, and a huge fan of Laurel and Hardy. They were on TV every Saturday morning. I watched all the reruns of their movies. I learned to do a perfect imitation of Stan saying, “I didn’t mean to do it Ollie.” My friends loved it, asking me to do it over and over again. It was amazing. But, then I’d go home for dinner and my woes would sink back in. My father would say, “You know, Bob, you’re pretty stupid.” My mother would say, “Oh Bobby, when will you amount to something? You’re like an albatross around our neck.” Then it was my sister Pamela’s turn: “You make me laugh. You’re the biggest loser I know—you don’t even try to win. Your motto should be ‘If at first I don’t succeed, I quit.”

I thought what she said about quitting was actually a little funny. It was a twist on the “try, try, again” proverb. I took my mother and father seriously. After dinner, after some TV, I’d brush my teeth and go to bed, hoping I might die in my sleep. But tonight, my sister’s insult had given me an idea. If I could memorize a lot of proverbs, my head would become full of life-saving wisdom that I could use as a foil to fight my negativity and seem smart at the same time.

My first proverb was “Happiness is a choice.” I got it off the internet. If happiness is a choice, it will be like choosing a piece of pie instead of a slice of cake! Watching “Laurel and Hardy” was the only thing that made me happy that I chose to do. Nothing else did. And also, I knew there was a difference between choosing to watch “Laurel and Hardy” and choosing to be happy. Happy about what? But, it didn’t matter. I could still quote the proverb to people and seem wise. Then, years later, a song came out titled “Don’t worry, be happy.” I first heard it disembarking through a jetway at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. The song made me happy, even with jet lag.

After all my years fumbling around with proverbs and getting nowhere, I used my knowledge of Garage Band to compose “Wise Notes.” It was a collection of techno music pieces centering on proverbs. The first song I composed, which is still my favorite, is “A Watched Pot Never Boils.” When it was played in clubs, dancers would make a circle with their hands and stare at it with frustrated looks on their faces. There’s also “Birds of a Feather Flock Together.” The sound track is full of bird songs, punctuated by a chicken clucking and electric bongo drums. People would dance in a circle—flocking together. They would tuck their hands in their armpits and flap their bent arms like wings when the chicken clucked.

“Wise Notes” achieved world-wide acclaim. The new musical genre “Proverb Techno” began to ascend and its popularity motivated many established artists to write and record in the genre: Bruce Springsteen’s “If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It“ affected a whole generation of young men and women and set the tone for their attitude toward repair.

Now, all that I wish is to be able to live in accord with proverbs, especially the ones I’ve exploited in my music to makes millions and millions of dollars. They all provide good advice, but I dwell on their other side, like I live in their shadow. At best they are aspirational, at worst they mock me. As they say, “A Drowning Man Will Clutch at a Straw.” Proverbs are my straw.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)

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Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric

Prozeugma

Posted on June 7, 2023 | Leave a comment

Prozeugma (pro-zoog’-ma): A series of clauses in which the verb employed in the first is elided (and thus implied) in the others.

I was making a difference. As I was, I was hoping the world was becoming a better place. One year ago, I had spent the day writing a poem about a cloned rabbit that was sure to be published in the literary magazine I subscribed to. The magazine was titled “Elevator News” and it was devoted to publishing “all forms of writing that lift us up.” They had been publishing since 1908. Their most famous editor was Robert Ice. He published “Mt Foot Fell Off.” It was a poem written by a WWI soldier who had endured the travails of trench warfare. It’s gripping portrayal of the soldier hopping across the train platform to embrace his girlfriend when he returns from the war, captures the cruelty of absence when he falls and bloodies his nose and his girlfriend, backing away in horror, falls off the platform and is crushed by the Lakeshore Limited, on which, her father is a Conductor. He is clutching a little toy bear—a gift for his illegitimate little daughter who lives in Utica, New York with her gin-soaked diseased prostitute mother.

When I read this I cried for twenty minutes. Robert Ice was himself a genius elevating the “maudlin” to heretofore impossible heights. Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” marks the apogee of maudlinism’s movement. My poem about the death and eating of a child’s cloned rabbit—“Rabbit Dinner”— attempts to forcefully resurrect Ice’s maudlinism by naming the rabbit “Gene” and portraying the boy’s tortured employment of heirloom silverware to dismember, slice up, and consume the rabbit, sopping up its gravy with a buttered piece of his mother’s homemade sourdough bread. After eating Gene and cleaning his plate, the boy looks at his reflection in his bread-burnished dish, seeing only his satisfied face crowned by Gene’s yellowish-gray femur. The boy goes to bed, goes to sleep, and dreams he is a truck driver.

I must admit, as I write this synopsis of “Rabbit Dinner,“ I am reminded of the poem’s excellence and perfect fit to maudlinism’s key rubrics. It vividly exemplifies the historical place of the rabbit in the food chain, and achieving the status of pet, and even given a name, it may nevertheless be eaten without a second thought—like a leek or a tomato.

We slaughter cows, pigs, chickens, rabbits, ducks, goats and the rest of the barnyard animals. Why? Because we eat them. If we don’t intend to eat it, we simply kill it and deprive it of it’s life. I killed a newborn kitten by stepping on it accidentally. I killed a deer and a raccoon too—I ate them. The kitten I couldn’t eat. I wrapped it in plastic wrap and buried it out in the woods behind my house. It’s mother didn’t care. If somebody had stepped on me when I was a baby, my mother would’ve cared. Or would she?

Oh, enough of this neurotic rambling. I apologize for pushing this piece of writing downhill. I just hope the current editor of “Elevator News” isn’t a stupid ass like the editors of “Literary Fortune,” “Wet Metaphors,” “No Rhyme,” “The Canyon Review,” and the 18 additional literary journals who rejected “Rabbit Dinner.” I will not give up. After reading “Rabbit Dinner” one of the critics said “A picture is worth 1,000 of your words.” That hurt. I wrote back, “You don’t know 1,000 words. Haha!” That’s the kind of wit I will be famous for.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)

Buy a print edition of The Daily Trope! The print edition is entitled The Book of Tropes and is available on Amazon for $9.99. There’s a Kindle edition available too.

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Tagged elocutio, figures of speech, rhetoric

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